


Who Wounds Most Deeply Most Deeply Loves

by Zabbers



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (Big Finish Audio)
Genre: Arrows, Blood, Bondage, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, M/M, Martyrs, Nudity, Roman Empire, and all the Renaissance art of St. Sebastian looks like Eight, getting shot full of arrows, in the sense of getting tied to a tree, it's not my fault Eight looks like a Renaissance painting, regeneration chicken, this is my first Jacobi/Eight fic I didn't know it would be like this, wound fetishization
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-01
Updated: 2020-12-01
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:41:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27807727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zabbers/pseuds/Zabbers
Summary: In 3rd-century Rome, the Master gives the Doctor the martyr's fate he's always seeking, the one with the arrows and the laurel tree.
Relationships: Eighth Doctor/The War Master (Jacobi), The Doctor/The Master (Doctor Who)
Comments: 7
Kudos: 19





	Who Wounds Most Deeply Most Deeply Loves

**Author's Note:**

> Apologies to D'Annunzio, Ovid, all the painters ever, bow-and-arrow enthusiasts, Christians, Romans, and French Canadians.

Manipulating the Romans of that time is a simple matter; decline comes so easily to humans, and the Master has long been afforded ample opportunity for practice. He almost cherishes them for it. The uneasiness of a civilisation that knows itself to be not what it once had been, the insecurity that comes of having wrested stability from a domain of power whose tremors could only increase in magnitude, the nagging fear, these are _his_ demesne. 

And he does look good in Roman court dress. 

He allows the damask of the paludamentum to slip over his arm as he raises it. It’s a shame about the togas. Perhaps by the time the humans see fit to establish a Neo-Roman Empire among the stars, they’ll have advanced enough to manage the intricacies of fabric and drape. Still: a war cape, well-embellished. It suits.

The archers respond to his gesture, exquisitely attuned. Tight expectation springs into being. He feels the tension of the arched bows as a geometry of energy in four dimensions, describing a pentachoron whose acute vertices are the languid tips of his fingers; the hands of the archers holding the nocked shafts in the taut bowstrings; the Doctor’s hands insolent and angry above his head; the curve in time that begins, as he gives the order, with the arc of his arm falling through the air and arrows flying into flesh; and the contact when the distance is closed and the insolence is subsumed and the breached skin is quivering at his touch. 

The heady potential of it tempts the smile onto his face. 

He’d spoken of virtue as the soldiers undressed the Doctor, addressed again the threat he posed to civic order by refusing the rites of ages, by his dissent. He described the Doctor’s crimes as they took his armour, unfastened and peeled away the petals of iron and leather, how, like the serpent of the illicit cult he had slipped among the legions and seduced them. 

He was against the military. He had struck at the engine of imperial power. He attacked the privileges of the citizen, betrayed the trust of brotherhood. He didn’t deserve to be protected from chafe and blister by the soft lorica around his neck and the sturdy sandals on his feet. Remove them, remove them. 

He had encouraged sedition and, impiously, would not sacrifice, did not respect. He endangered the people with his impiety and his lack of virtue. He poisoned them. His very existence, the Master said as they loosened the cingulum and lifted the Doctor’s tunic over his head, _was_ poison. Look at the others who had had to be put down already. 

The Doctor had gone slack at these words so that the men undressing him staggered suddenly at the unexpected weight. They'd dragged him unresisting then to the waiting tree, each matching a limb of flesh to a limb of living wood. They wound ropes around his wrists and ankles, an elbow, one bended knee, the last tugged sharply from behind to discourage slack. His hair caught on the slimmest sprigs, entangling with glossy leaves. The linen still at his hips snagged on the shingles of bark and slipped loose toward his thighs, exposing the shape of bone. 

The Doctor had watched the Master raise his hand; rallying, he had straightened into glaring defiance, daring, disbelief. 

“You won’t really have me executed,” he insisted, “like this. You wouldn’t want to waste your power on something so pointless.”

“On the contrary, you’ll find it’s about to be very pointed indeed.”

The Doctor raised his voice then, still confident and haughty. “Archers! Bowmen! You don’t have to obey the Master. He doesn’t rule you. He will never rule you.”

But his words, his rhetoric might as well have gone untranslated. He had it wrong. There was no compulsion in this bated anticipation of force, only persuasive oration, only natural inclination and the logic of ready weapons.

Now, the grammar of drawn bows. The simple halved-sine singing of strings. The muscles in the archers’ arms, the release at the Master’s signal. 

Shafts cut the air. A shiver before the points reach skin, follicles alerted by the kiss of wind. Swift, swift, sharp possibility, every arrow. Probabilities. Inevitabilities. 

Impacts. The thud of contact. The strange, long groaning that builds as the archers load again. Arms strain; they take aim, efficient as only professionals are, no doubt timing themselves, yet at their ease, with a target that does not move away, which doesn't fight back, who they themselves have spread against the tree so that they might have their pick of places on the pale, unbroken body. 

There is the one who looses arrow after arrow, emptying his quiver almost immediately, who afterwards stands idle staring. Another who steps further and further away, apparently testing his aim, precise but arcane with his choices. A third is soon in a nervous sweat, eyes seeking shelter where none is to be found. The Master is fascinated. 

He watches the steady fire, studies the faces of the human executioners. These bowmen are soldiers, specialists. They know full well the force of their weapons, what that force will do to flesh. They've killed often. They've been in battles in which they took the wound or stood untouched next to the abruptly, shockingly wounded, blood blooming everywhere. Their world, their species asks this of them. Ephemeral and expendable, what think they of butchery? Nothing and everything. 

The pitch of the sustained moaning rises; layered atop the noise of growl-voiced breath, a higher note tinges, jagged and uncontrolled. It’s an animal sound, not yet hysteria. The Master’s gaze is drawn to the Doctor’s. The Doctor flinches and flinches again: like the Master, he can track the trajectory of the arrows, he can follow the fierce, true flights. Like the Master, he can’t suspend the fiery messages of pain when they hit, driving into bone or wood, the faithful signals of his efficient nervous system. There’ll be no relief in the confusion of shock, no respite until the Master calls for a cessation. 

There is only endurance. There’s only Time Lord clarity, Time Lord strength. 

This is what biology means. Who would have thought, when they made the Time Lords, that their gifts would come to this?

When a well-aimed arrow cuts off the Doctor’s cry, the Master closes his hand on the archer’s upper arm. He dismisses the sagittarii in their own language. He never takes his eyes from the Doctor’s throat. 

_Like a fish on a hook_ , he thinks with some amusement, _gasping, wide-eyed and contorted, lifted out of water by the fine line on the barb in its gill._

He’s watching for the flash of silver as he saunters to the tree, for light catching on pale irises, like two detached and iridescent scales. He's always loved this Doctor’s eyes. The regeneration is beautiful, born in the crossfire of human violence, guileless and hard, spare and overflowing. How he had wanted that life for himself when he had had nothing; it pleases him better now to enjoy the Doctor’s body from the outside. 

He touches his fingers to an arrow’s feather, to the shapely fletch, still quivering. This lightest of touches transmits as if singing along a wire; the Doctor shivers. The Master runs his palm across the field of fletchings, and the Doctor is like a wing with a breath on it, in flight with the wind that is the exhalation of the world, brushing the hidden filoplumes, exquisitely sensitive. The Master could play him as though he’s strung on a frame. 

But the Doctor is somewhere else, his focus on some distant and inaudible harp far over the Master’s head, denying the intimacy of what the Master has caused. 

The Master scowls.

“ _Attend!_ ”— 

—and he sweeps his arm with force, enough to jostle the long shafts one against the other in a music of dry, hollow reeds and the Doctor’s hoarse voice. Some, shallow, fall from him like twigs. Wounds open and close like the Doctor’s mouth. In the aftermath, the Doctor stares at him, the uncertainty of his focus more a matter of difficulty than of disobedience. 

That’s better.

The Master lets the snarl slip from his face, the forward momentum relax from his spine, recovering the steady shoulders of equanimity by increments. 

“My own little hedgehog,” he says in a tone that's light again, “wild with pain. It seems I’ve pierced you.”

The Doctor can’t speak, of course. He daren’t move his head. His mouth is red. 

The Master frowns down at the folds of his cloak where the richly-coloured trim gives way to fine white cloth. The cloth is streaked, as garish as the Doctor’s mouth. He unpins the golden brooch at his shoulder and allows the unwieldy, weighty fabric to spill away behind him. Clad only in cuirass and tunic, hammered bronze, woven wool, boiled-leather pteruges at his shoulders and dependent from his waist, he is so very close to the Doctor’s exposed skin. He lays a hand on an unmarred stretch, reaching between arrows. 

The Doctor’s straining to look at him, anguished. _What is it you_ want _from me?_

“I would quite like you to tell me how this feels.”

There's a second of refusal, dignity clinging to the preservation of a privacy he can't be forced to give up. Then release, almost relief, opening into the Master’s patiently receptive mind like a sob. It is such an indulgence that the Master laughs, clasping as ferociously to the sense information as he might clasp to the Doctor’s thighs with his own—were propriety to allow the thought. Most fascinating is the impression of weight: the weight of the arrows in the wounds, causing them to gape when pulled on, the weight of the Doctor’s own arms and legs, his body sagging against the bonds that hold him to the tree and the iron-tipped quills that tack him to the wood, just barely upright. 

“What if I untied you now, hmm?” Without waiting for an answer, the Master reaches for the ropes above the Doctor’s head, working deft fingers into a knot. “Would these arrows hold you? Or would you tumble from the tree’s embrace and leave them all behind?” 

Perhaps he’d strip away from his body entirely, the spirit from the flesh. He could stroll into Rome tomorrow, reborn, mistaken for a miracle. 

The Master supports the first of the Doctor’s elbows with his cupped palm while he releases the other restraint. The arrows that struck him here have pierced his underarm; there, the muscle of his forearm. Both shake as the ropes slip away. The Master leans in, pressing against the elbows. 

“Don’t fall,” he challenges softly, and lets go; as hedge against his own advice, he draws the Doctor with him as he steps back, introducing an impelling momentum. 

He’s almost pleased when the Doctor doesn’t, amused, certainly, at his desperate concentration. “Very good, Doctor. We wouldn’t want you torn to shreds so soon. Let’s leave your legs as they are for now.”

He surveys the overall pattern and decides to begin with the arms after all. He strokes at the matted hair around the near arrow. “You have to wonder if the fellow who was being so careful with his aim _planned_ this particular target when they were tying you up. Yes, yes, I will concede that none of them have managed to hit you in the only heart they think you have; given the severity of those stomach wounds, however, I would hardly call it a mercy. How very human, how very humane of them.”

He tugs the arrow out of the Doctor’s armpit. 

The Doctor inhales, and the Master sees him regretting it, gagging on air. 

“You have seen their battlefields. Cesspits. As bad as a Dalek sewer.”

The Master had equipped his Mauri bowmen with bodkin heads, for the most part, on long, light shafts. He had wanted to penetrate the Doctor, not to pulp him. The narrow points are easy enough to remove if they haven’t lodged themselves deeply, if mild steel has parted only soft tissue; and if the wounds don’t exactly close after them, neither do they cause any more damage coming out. All along one arm, leaving the wrist pinned, the Master plucks a harvest of slender splints, pioneering a path of holes.

“ _Oh_ ,” he murmurs, coming to the far side with a delighted sense of discovery, “one of the other kind.”

The larger trilobate head has made a carnage of the Doctor’s shoulder, crushing into the hollow a three-angled star that winks as the Master eases it out, the cut radiating from centre. Blood drains along the iron channels as they slowly withdraw from flesh. It's like tapping for sap in spring. 

The legs, next. A spike in the knot of the bent knee, another through a foot, as though in search of the fatal heel. The Master travels leisurely from bottom up, discarding arrows in a pile with a clatter. He takes time over the deepest penetrations, supporting the body as he pries the point from trunk, applying force against stubborn resistance, the base of his hand at the embedded root of fletching. The holes leak and spurt, dripping in rivulets and sticky streams down the Doctor’s rounded calves and thighs. 

“Je te plumerai les _pattes_...” he singsongs under his breath, half to himself. 

It's a pleasure to press his fingers into the soft seam at the top of the leg, into curls that he smooths out of the way of the arrow sunk there before grasping it in his hand. By now, the Doctor’s shuddering, one continuous reaction to the entire experience, stretched out as endlessly as the Master can make it. He brushes over the narrow cloth at the Doctor’s hip. It's a wonder it's still dangling from him. Hiding very little. 

He adjusts it summarily.

The punctures in the Doctor’s gut well and weep prettily when the arrowheads leave them, especially the one left by the flat, barbed wide-blade. It sticks at first in spite of the shallowness of the entry, the wicked tines catching, and he has to yank hard to slice it out past the resistance of meat and skin. The Doctor jerks in place as his flesh gives. His face is a storm of astonished agony, his shout garbled. The Master presses hurriedly against him. 

_Really. Don't fall._

_Don't...let me._

The Master cranes his head so his raised eyebrow can be seen. 

_Please._

_I won't._ He settles the Doctor’s weight securely and steps back. “Not at the moment, anyway. Not while we're having such a good time.”

He loosens an arrow that has threaded itself in and out of the Doctor’s skin like a needle through fabric. “Perhaps I'll have you stitched up,” he muses, touching each of the cuts in turn. 

“Or perhaps I'll stitch you up myself, in threads of silver and silk. I'll, oh, I'll knot the hanging ends around my knuckles and use the strings as leashes, and parade you for your humans. Then we’ll go on tour and display you to the universe. All the people will want to view you, the famous Doctor, so beautiful, so luminous, laid open so they can see...everything.”

With his thumbs on either side of the broadhead gash, he presses and pulls, revealing the messy space inside it. He pries at the Doctor with the scissoring of two fingers. The Doctor whines, writhes. On impulse, the Master ducks his head to taste, his lips on the Doctor’s belly. He's questing for the bitter, telltale dirt of rupture under the tang of blood. 

He unbends and sees himself through the Doctor’s addled torment: his mouth painted, his beard dripping. There is, in his eyes, something as hazy and as sharp as the Doctor’s pain, like the shadow of ice in storm cloud, jagged daggers hidden glinting in grey as the front moves through him. 

There ought to be laurels in his hair, he thinks, a laudatory wreath, a conqueror’s crown, lush upon his head. Imperator. Caesar. Augustus. These human words feel good on his tongue; he’d like to hear them in address from a throng of subjects. If they must be human, then so be it. He’s pursued the Doctor time and again to this planet, the feel of the chase always in the back of his mind—the Doctor, fleet and fleeing in the rustling underbrush, the fragrance of disturbed vegetation, the leaden rejection met with iron, and even when caught, his quarry always eluding him. Even now, he’s taking refuge in the tree to which he’s staked, too beautiful for his own good. 

The coronet the Master will wear would be composed of the Doctor’s body, harvested from this Doctor’s body. He would fashion it with his own hands, and place it at his own temple, and march under its crimson, thorned shadow at his triumph. 

“Always, I will have you,” he says, almost angry. “Always, my hands will have you, my futures, my lives will have you. My Doctor. My rabbit, my doe, my dove. My lark. Morning might never come. I’ll pluck your eyes. I’ll pluck your head.”

He’s breathing heavily again by the time he blinks back to himself, his voice a growling mutter; only four arrows remain, in the Doctor’s chest and through his throat and one pinning each of his arms, by the wrist and the splayed hand. Although he’s slumping, stretched, the Doctor’s scrutinising him with the horrible disapproving pity, the uncomprehending condescension he produces no matter the regeneration. 

He should ream that look off his face—if only it would work; if only it ever worked. Instead, he wraps his palms around the shaft of the arrow in the Doctor’s chest. The point has stopped against a rib, scratching bone. The lightweight reed flexes under the force of his grip. Careful not to snap it, he levers the tip until he’s certain of its aim.

“Unlike the humans,” the Master hisses, “I know where your hearts are.”

He pushes, putting his weight into it, lifting onto the balls of his feet. He slides the arrow all the way home, into stalwart, contracting muscle. 

The Doctor shouts. His hand is suddenly on the Master’s head, snatching at his hair, trying to thrust him away. The Master grabs for it and slams it back against the tree. Warm liquid runs down between their palms and from the wood and feathers of the arrow he’s left embedded in the trunk, staining the bark and their skin. 

But the Doctor’s gurgling, wide-eyed, his throat tearing on the hard-carburised edge of the spike arrowhead still thrust through it. 

“Stop, stop,” the Master exclaims.

You _stop!_

 _No,_ you— _keep still. Don’t move._ He releases the Doctor’s hand, reaches urgently for his jaw. He makes his fingers gentle, ginger on the ravaged neck. It’s slick, tight, hot. The Doctor’s hair is plastered along his skin, and he’s close to panic, he’s heaving, out of control.

But he's close to something else too, welling up too near the surface, filling in every hole, intolerant of any damage, the pathetic light, bright in his gaping mouth, pale, intrusive, insistent. And the Doctor’s still squirming, worm now more than fish, hurting himself with every motion.

“If you don’t want to regenerate, then _let me help_.” 

The Master hunts for purchase in the slippery mess. It's slipping his fingers into a stand of warm, viscous vines, forcing them to part, but precise, probing, wary of further damage. It's _wet_. The Doctor’s whimpering, struggling to cooperate, his hand a claw on the Master’s shoulder. 

At last, he has it; he has the arrow out, releasing the Doctor’s throat, tossing the arrow aside, returning for his chest...but the Doctor knocks him away, temporarily strong, to yank the stake from his own heart in one sharp motion, and to reach for and wrench the final dart from his wrist as well—only to fall, unbalanced, onto his hands, his legs still tied to the base of the tree. 

The Master doesn’t think twice of drawing his pugio and cutting him free, the razor-edged dagger slicing straight through the rope. The Doctor crashes to the grass, the strength and the threatening light giving out at once as though doused. Crouched on one knee at his side with armour's leather feathers brushing the ground, the Master looks keenly, searching for the stuttering breath, stopping still when he finds it. He rests his hand, just for a moment, in the Doctor’s sweat-drenched hair. 

“Not quite a martyr yet,” he comments, sardonic. In the cult of the Master, they’re neither ready for godhead, neither ready to worship. But there’s the vine staff still tucked into his baldric, there’s the fustuarium: beatings both personal and public; other punishments are available. Human creativity is such a deep and charming pool. 

The Doctor tries to speak, can't, reverts to thought. _And not my executioner. At least, not yet._

The Doctor’s all tangled in the roots of the deadly tree, still bleeding to feed the soil. The Master takes up his discarded cloak to drape across the Doctor’s back, covering the naked perforations and the bark-scoured skin. He’ll wrap him in it and bear him out of this plain that was once mist-laced laurel wood. He’ll return him to the soldiers and make them forget they’ve already killed him once. He’ll wait for him to heal. 

In the meantime, he thinks he’ll have a bath, wash the blood from his face, find some human attendant to scrape the sweat from his skin. As for Empire, and deification, perhaps not today. The Master adjusts the fabric of his ruined tunic, smoothing the rumpled folds.

“Well...there's always tomorrow.”


End file.
